Excerpt from Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Moïse

It's a big cell. It's square. A concrete bench runs along the wall facing the door.

On the same wall, high up, there's a rectangular opening that might possibly let a cat through. Or a very thin dog, like Bosco.

I'm sitting on the bench. If I look up I can see a fragment of sky that's so blue and motionless that I wonder if it's not a picture. There's a word for them, those things, pictures painted to look like the real thing, I can't remember it now, if Marie were here she'd have ...

My hands are starting to shake, I shouldn't have thought about Marie. I try to steady them between my thighs, to squeeze them under my armpits, to cross my fingers as if I were praying with all my strength but it doesn't stop.

My name's Moïse, I'm fifteen years old and at dawn I killed someone. I'd like them to know I barely squeezed the trigger, if Marie were here I'd have told her that, I'd have told her like this I barely squeezed it Mam and it went off, and she'd have believed me, but it's more than a year now that Marie's been gone. I'm alone and I killed Bruce in the woods at dawn. Bruce with his barbarian's heart and his sick brain and his serpent's tongue. Bruce, who did that to me ...

I killed him.

He crumpled up and an uh emerged from his throat like a choking gasp and after that, there in the woods, for long minutes there was nothing but the day dawning and that pink glow slicing through the branches, bearing down on Bruce like knife blades. The pistol was hot, hard, and heavy in my hand. I gripped it firmly and felt its energy mounting up my arm like thousands of burning needles.

I sat down on the ground. Between Bruce and me there was a carpet of dry eucalyptus leaves. I pictured him standing there beside his own body, half-dead, half-alive, the way he used to stand when he'd been smoking spice, his head tilted on one side, his hands in his hair, his fingers twisting his frizzy curls rapidly this way and that, unable to stop this nervous tic, wondering what the hell he's doing here, stretched out among the eucalyptus trees with that stain on his T-shirt. Can he see me, this half-dead, half-alive Bruce? Is he starting to forget who he is or, on the contrary, is everything clear, everything plain? Does he see his whole life spread out before him, does he have regrets, or is he as filled with rage as ever?

This island turned us into dogs, Bruce. You, who'd chosen the nickname of a superhero, Bruce Wayne, you once explained to me, while jumping up and down on the spot as if you had springs in your feet. Bruce Wayne, Batman, because you liked bats, or at least that's what you told me, although for my part, I never saw you liking anything other than smoking spliffs and dominating other people.

This island has made me into a killer. Do you remember how you used to say to me No Mercy Mo, well you see, Bruce, this morning I had none for you.

I slipped the gun back into my rucksack, and thought about everything it contained from my past life, from that life when I lived in a house built from rectangular, pinkish bricks, when the nighttime was for dogs, flying foxes, and thieves and I was not yet a dog, a thief, a killer but just a boy with one green eye and one dark eye. I thought about how this black, weighty gun was now lying there next to my book and Marie's scarf, I pictured the black pistol possibly getting caught up with her identity card, maybe the barrel of the murder weapon was pointing at the photo of Marie in the top right-hand corner of her card. I told myself that if I stuck my head into the rucksack now, the way I like to do, because I imagine that things from the past have a smell of their own and that this smell, unlike people and dogs, lasts for ever, well, you see, sometimes it's only this fantasy of a smell that lasts for ever that keeps me from going mad, yes, I told myself that if I stuck my head into my bag now, there'd be nothing but gunpowder, iron and blood and that, there you are, such was my life now.

Excerpt from Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah copyright © 2016 by Editions Gallimard; English language translation copyright © 2018 by Geoffrey Strachan. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.